by John Norman
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"It was there," she said, "that I learned the nature of the males of Earth, and to despise them."
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
I heard a tiny sound again, very similar to the first.
"I have replaced the whip on my belt," she said. Then she came again in front of me, where she might look down on me. The whip hung again at her belt.
"I'm not going to whip you now," she said.
"Thank you, Mistress," I said.
"What is your name?" she asked.
"Jason," I said. "Jason Marshall."
"You have no name," she said.
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"But 'Jason' will do," she said. "You are Jason."
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"The name is now a slave name," she said, "put on you because it pleases me."
"Yes, Mistress," I said. I was now a named slave.
She went to the side of the cell. There, on a shelf, were two shallow pans. They had been there before. She carried one of them over to me. It contained, as I now saw, pieces of meat. She held the pan in her left hand and, with her right hand, picked out a piece of meat.
She looked down at me.
"The transition to slavery will be easier for you than for a true man," she said, "but it will still, doubtless, not be easy for you."
I looked up at her, miserably.
"Feed, Jason," she said, putting the piece of meat in my mouth.
"I have been to Earth," she said. "I have seen the males there. There are so few men among them. Is it so hard, I wonder, to be a man. Why is it that so many of the males of Earth have given up their manhood, and pretend to rejoice in their mutilation. Doubtless there are complex historical causes. It is interesting, the grotesque shapes into which culture can shape a tortured biology."
As she spoke, she continued to feed me.
"But I feel no pity for you sorry males of Earth," she said, "for you have permitted this to be done to you. What despicable weaklings and cowards you are. You have little left to you but the vestiges of your manhood, and you let even those, bit by bit, be taken from you."
She thrust another piece of meat in my mouth.
"Poor, pretty Jason," she said. "He does not know what to think." She smiled at me. "I will tell you a secret, Jason," she said, "you were a slave before, but did not know it. You were the slave of a culture, of values, of propaganda and women. Your chains were invisible, so you pretended they did not exist. But did you not, nonetheless, feel their weight? Are things so different here than there for you? There is, surely, little true difference. The whips here, of course, are of real leather, and the chains of honest iron. When you feel them you need not pretend they are something other than what they are." She stopped feeding me. "They are precisely what they seem," she said, "true leather and iron. And you are precisely what you seem to be, a slave."
"Yes, Mistress," I said, miserably.
She then put the pan of meat down on the stones, where I might reach it. She then went back to the shelf and brought the other pan to where I knelt. She placed it within my reach, on the stones. It contained water.
"Put your head down and drink," she said. "Do not use your hands."
I put my head down and drank.
"Stop," she said.
I stopped.
She then, with her foot, white in that high, bootlike, thonged sandal, slid both the pan of meat and the pan of water out of my reach.
"The slave is completely dependent on the master or mistress," she said, "even for food and drink."
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
She then, again, with her foot, slid the pan of meat and the pan of water to where I might reach them.
"Say 'Thank you, Mistress,'" she said.
"Thank you, Mistress," I said.
"Put your head down again, and drink," she said.
Again I put my head down and, frightened, drank.
"Oh," she said, "how I despise you, and how I shall enjoy working with you."
I trembled.
"Look up, Jason," she said.
I looked up.
"Look into my eyes," she said.
I did so. It was difficult to meet her gaze.
"Who is stronger?" she asked.
"You, Mistress," I said. I had never encountered such inflexible resolve in a human being. I knew I could not begin to match the power and strength of her will, her stern character. I could only bend helplessly before it. She was totally superior to me. She was mistress; I was slave.
"Do I frighten you, Jason?" she asked.
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"You need only try to be totally pleasing," she said. "You will then, to some extent, improve your chances for life."
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"The matter rests with me," she said, "with whether I am pleased or not."
"I will try to please you, Mistress," I said.
"I'm sure you will, pretty Jason," she said. She then stepped back from me. "I am not so terrible," she said. "I can be kind."
I looked at her, startled.
"Oh," she laughed, slapping the whip roughly at her side, "do not think I will not be strict with you. I am strict with all my charges. All, like yourself, must obey perfectly. All must be fully pleasing."
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"But, too," she said, "I can be kind. There are worse mistresses on Gor than I."
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"On this world, as on yours," she said, "there can be rewards for pleasing slaves. For example, perhaps in the future, you need not be chained like a raw slave, naked, in a stinking cell. There are better accommodations in the pens."
I put down my head. How conscious I was of the chains I wore.
She went to the heavy door of the cell, which she had left open. There she stopped, and turned to face me. I turned to my left, to see her.
"Rewards, like punishments," she said, "lie within the prerogatives of the mistress, to distribute, both with respect to type and abundance, as she pleases."
"I understand, Mistress," I said.
"You understand, too, do you not," she asked, "that you are in my total power?"
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"Whether you live or die is up to my whim," she said.
"Yes, Mistress," I said, miserably.
"You are a slave," she said, "fully. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"But I am not cruel," she said. "If you please me, totally, I may even be kind to you."
"I will try to please you, Mistress," I said.
"It is in my power to make your life more pleasant, if I choose," she said. "Rewards can be many and varied, different sorts of chains and cells, clothing, and of various sorts, a lighter collar, different sorts of food. I can even have a woman thrown to you." She smiled. "Or would you, a male of Earth, know what to do with one?"
She turned about then and went through the heavy door of the cell, that door formed, like that wall of the cell itself, of bars and heavy, lateral crosspieces, set some six inches apart. She swung shut the door and it closed, with a heavy metallic ring that reverberated in the cells and corridor. She stood behind it, looking at me.
"Yes," she said, "you are pretty, Jason. I think you will do very nicely."
"Who are you?" I cried.
She looked at me from the other side of the bars. She was a large woman, tall and strong. She stood very straight. Her figure was striking. Her skin was very white. It contrasted vividly with the brief, confining black leather she wore. She wore, too, a headband of leather. At her waist was the heavy belt, from which hung a coiled chain, a ring of keys, a pair of manacles and a whip. "I am the Lady Gina," she said, "your trainer."
"Trainer?" I cried.
"Yes," she said.
"I do not understand," I said. "What is your work?"
"Have you not guessed?" she asked. "I train men to give pleasure to women."
I looked at her with horror.
She then took the ring of keys from her belt and thrust a key into the lock on the cell door, and turned it, locking the heavy door.
"Sleep well, pretty Jason," she said. "Your lessons begin in the morning."
She then replaced the keys on her belt, and left.
4
Lola and Tela
"Put your wrists behind you," she said.
I stood in my cell. I had been freed of my chains. I put my wrists behind me, obeying the Lady Gina. She took the manacles from her belt and expertly, almost casually, in one motion, threw them on me, snapping them shut. I gathered she had manacled many men.
She tied a belt of soft, rolled cloth about my waist. She then took a long strip of cloth, some five feet long and eight inches wide, thrust it over the cloth belt in front, took it under and between my legs, passed it under and over the cloth belt in back, and, adjusting it, drew it snugly tight.
"This is not for your modesty, Jason," she said. "It is because your lessons in Gorean will largely be conducted by slave girls."
"Slave girls, Mistress?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "They are stinking, meaningless, lascivious little sluts who have been as slaves in the arms of Gorean men. It has spoiled them for freedom. They are worthless, sensuous little beasts whose passions Gorean men have seen fit, as cruel masters, to ignite. Their sexuality, their shamelessness, their needs, their helplessness, makes them an insult to free women. I do not want them falling to their knees by you, to seize you, to fawn upon you, to hold you, to lick and kiss you."
"No, Mistress," I said.
She then removed the chain from her belt and snapped it on the metal ring attached to my collar. I had, this morning, when my chains had been removed, felt the attachment. It was as I had conjectured, a ring. It was about a quarter of an inch thick. It was sturdy. It was of iron.
"Come along, Jason," she said. She then led me, manacled and leashed, from the cell.
* * * *
"This is Lola. This is Tela," said the Lady Gina, pointing, respectively, to the two girls.
I was startled. Never would I, of Earth, have believed such women could exist. I could scarcely breathe. I was stunned. I beheld, for the first time in my life, Gorean slave girls.
I met their eyes. They beheld me with a sullen interest. Both girls were incredibly beautiful, and almost naked, but that tells little about them. I suppose, if you have never looked upon a slave girl, it will be impossible for me to convey to you more than an inkling of what it is to see one, particularly for the first time. Imagine, if you will, the most exciting and desirable woman you have ever seen; then imagine her standing stripped before you in a steel collar, and that the collar is yours, and that you own her, and that she must obey. That will convey to you something of what it is to see a slave girl. I looked on the girls. Surely their bodies were graceful, curvaceous and vital; surely they were both unusually, even incredibly, beautiful; surely, too, both had been limited in their raiment to the rags of half-naked slaves; yet it was not these things, strange as it may seem, which so set them apart from other women; it was not these things which made them so different. What set them so apart from other women, what made them so different, what made their beauty ten thousand times more devastating and exciting than that of other women was that they, in full actuality, in full reality, were owned slaves.
Both girls knelt before the Lady Gina. She spoke to them in Gorean. I heard the word 'Kajirus', which I would later learn was an expression for a male slave, and I heard the expression 'Jason', which was the name I had been given. How I envied the Lady Gina, having two such beauties kneeling before her.
The two slaves looked up at her, deferentially, attending to her every word.
I could not take my eyes from the two slave girls. They were the first slave girls I had ever seen.
The Lady Gina spoke to them rapidly, and in detail.
Slave girls are unlike and beyond all other women. Earth, with its frigid, competitive, frustrated females, trying to be men, has not even prepared one for the understanding that such fantastic, owned beauties could exist. What wonders does the collar work upon a woman! How it transforms her! The Goreans say that no woman is a true woman until she has submitted as a slave, and that no man has experienced his full sexuality until he has thrown her to the foot of his couch. Looking upon the girls I wondered if it were not a madness that any woman is let out of the collar. Are they not all, truly, property, the property of men, as I had once wondered? Should they not all, truly, be owned by men?
One of the girls, Lola, asked a question of the Lady Gina, to which she promptly replied. She continued then with her instructions, whatever they might be.
I clenched my fists in the manacles that confined my hands behind my back. I wanted to scream with pleasure that I had been brought to a world on which such women could exist. They were deeply sensuous, profoundly feminine, excruciatingly luscious, and slaves.
The Lady Gina turned her right hand, back down, to the floor, and lifted it slightly. Both girls, obedient to the gesture, rose together to their feet.
They turned to regard me. Both girls were dark-haired and dark-eyed. Lola's hair was darker than that of Tela. Goreans, male and female, like most of those of Earth stock, from which they are doubtless derived, or derived for the most part, are brunet types. Statistical deviations in large numbers from this type occur only in Torvaldsland and in certain other areas in the northern latitudes. Lola, I conjecture, was in the neighborhood of five feet four inches tall and would have weighed about one hundred and twenty pounds; Tela, who was a bit smaller, I would conjecture would have been about five feet three inches tall and would have weighed a pound or two less, perhaps about one hundred and eighteen pounds.
"Do you like the girls, Jason?" asked the Lady Gina.
I looked upon the two girls. They were sweetly slung, with truly feminine bodies, luscious and curvaceous. Their breasts were bared. Each, about her hips, wore a gray rag, knotted high on the left hip, to expose the left hip and thigh. Each, on her throat, wore a light, locked steel collar. The collars had writing on them, incised in the steel, which I could not read. The rag at their hips and the steel on their neck were all they wore. Both were barefoot.
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"They will be your principal tutors in Gorean," she said.
"Yes, Mistress," I said. "Thank you, Mistress."
"Beware of them," she said.
"Mistress?" I asked.
I saw quirts thrust in their hands.
"Kneel, Jason," said the Lady Gina.
In consternation I knelt.
The quirts were thrust to my face.
"Kiss the quirts," she said.
I did so, commanded by the woman whom I feared, who was my mistress.
"In the time of your lessons," she said, "they will be to you as I, your mistresses. You will obey them, perfectly. You will learn swiftly and well."
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"Look upon these slave girls," said the Lady Gina.
I looked upon them. What fantastically attractive women they were, their lovely faces framed in cascades of dark hair, their throats, closely encircled by steel collars, their shoulders, their breasts, bared, their narrow waists and sweetly flared hips, the bit of rag they wore, their thighs, calves, ankles and small, high-arched feet.
"Do you find them beautiful?" asked the Lady Gina.
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
"Do you desire them?" she asked.
"Yes, Mistress," I said.
The Lady Gina nodded to the two girls and they, suddenly, viciously, began to lash at me with the leather quirts.
I put my head down, miserably. I was startled. When I looked up, confused, frightened, my body stung in a dozen places.
The Lady Gina spoke to the slave, Lola. Immediately the girl placed her hands behind her head and threw her head back, arching her back and body, legs flexed, before me. I supposed that i
t was sometimes in such a fashion that slave girls were ordered to display themselves for the pleasure or inspection of masters. I almost sobbed with the pleasure of seeing her.
"Your hands are manacled, Jason," said the Lady Gina. "Too bad. You would like to touch her, wouldn't you?"
"Yes, Mistress," I said, miserably.
The Lady Gina nodded to the girl Tela who then, crying out angrily, struck me twice with her quirt. Lola meanwhile broke her pose and looked at me, impassively.
I looked up at the Lady Gina. There were tears in my eyes, from the stinging of the blows of the quirt.
"Poor Jason," she said, soothingly. Then, again, she spoke to Lola. Lola, the beautiful slave girl, then tore away the rag from her hips and lowered herself to the tiles. She lay then on her back before me. She threw her ankles apart and put her wrists to her sides, their backs to the tiles. It seemed she struggled, as though she might be chained in place, and then resigned herself to her helplessness, and turned her face to me. I looked down at her. It was as though she lay chained before me. Again, suddenly, it seemed she tried to free herself, but could not do so. Then her struggles, it seemed, grew weaker, and she lay before me, as though awaiting whatever fate a master might choose to bestow upon her. Suddenly tears sprang to her eyes. She tried to hold herself still. She bit her lip, to control herself. She, a slave girl, lay before a man.
The Lady Gina, suddenly, viciously, kicked her, and spoke sharply to her. The girl closed her eyes and lay perfectly still. Again the Lady Gina spoke to her. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. She lifted her body to me. Then she lay back on the tiles, watching me, her sweet breasts rising and falling with her breathing.
I could scarcely believe how beautiful, how desirable, was the female slave lying before me. I, a man of Earth, wanted to cry out with wonder that a woman could be so beautiful. I, a man of Earth, wanted to scream with joy that a woman could even begin to be so desirable. And what I did not understand at the time was that the girls, Lola and Tela, though surely astoundingly lovely, were only a little above the average for Gorean slave girls.
"Would you like to take her in your arms?" asked the Lady Gina.
I began to squirm. "Please, don't hit me," I begged.